Meine erste Woche in Berlin

So I've now lived in Berlin for a week and am beginning to fall into a routine after being sick for my first few days and having a busy weekend.

After a week of classes, I'm enjoying my language course at the Goethe Institut. I'm the only Macalester student and the only American in my course, so it should be a great way to meet a diverse group of people from all over the world while also improving my German skills.

Since we only have class in the mornings, I've had plenty of time to start exploring Berlin. The first few days I mostly ran errands and wandered around Mitte, the part of the city where Goethe is located. Running errands usually involved going to Alexanderplatz, one of Berlin's largest shopping centers where several large malls are located. At Alexanderplatz, there's also the Berliner Fernsehnturm,  a television tower that is the tallest structure in Germany:

On Thursday, my friend Alex came to visit from Paris, where he's been studying abroad:

Over the course of the weekend, I visited a few museums, saw some of  Berlin's famous sites, saw my first opera (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), and hung out with friends at a few bars. 

My adventures included Hamburger Bahnhof, a former train station which now is a contemporary art museum:

The Hamburger Bahnhof had some great artwork, including pieces by Andy Warhol and Anselm Kiefer, a German painter whose work I've studied in previous German classes:

There was also this really cool installation entitled "Cloud Cities" in the main hall:

and we were allowed to crawl around in one of the cloud bubbles:

On Friday, I visited the Brandenburg Tor again:

and visited Potsdamer Platz, which is the Berlin equivalent of Times Square: 

Almost all of the infrastructure of Potsdamer Platz was built in the past 15 years, since the Berliner Mauer ran through the middle of the square. Some of the wall still remains at Potsdamer Platz today so I saw my first chunk of the Berliner Mauer as well:

Saturday, I visited the Jüdisches Museum. The architecture of the building is really interesting as the building is a twisted zig-zag shape that is only accessible through an underground tunnel. Here's the outside of the building:

In the museum, there are several unheated, concrete-walled voids which run vertically through the building. In the architect Daniel Libeskind's words, these voids refer to "that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: Humanity reduced to ashes." The floor of one of these voids is covered by an art installation, Shalecht, or Fallen Leaves. 

Overall, museum was an educational and interesting, although also sobering experience.

The weekend was rounded out by visiting a flea market on Sunday. 

Today, I took advantage of the reciprocity program between the Jüdisches Museum and the Berlinische Galerie and visited the latter. The museum's main exhibit outlined the history of art in Berlin since the turn of the 19th century, while most of the special exhibits were photography from the 1930s-1950s. Here's a sculpture from the Dada movement of the 1920s:

Bis später.

Margo